Ever had a really bad day, with miserable tasks before you, and found yourself daydreaming about a tropical Caribbean beach in search of relief. I know I have. Have you noticed that it doesn’t really work?

An article published in Science written by the researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert sought to capture the activities that people engaged in, the thoughts they were having while engaged in said activity, and their level of happiness at the moment of their engagement in the activity. Their research involved the use of an iPhone app that randomly contacted people and asked them what they were doing, what they were thinking, and what they were feeling.

What the research shows is that people who were most thoroughly engaged and mentally concentrated on the task before them rated the highest level of happiness. The people, whose minds had wandered, regardless of the activity, rated the least amount of happiness. Furthermore, the researchers found evidence that it was the mind wandering itself that caused the unhappiness and not that unhappiness caused the mind wandering. When the content of the mind wandering was factored into it, the people who wandered to negative thoughts were unhappier than the people who wandered to pleasant thoughts, but the people who didn’t wander at all, and who remained engaged and concentrated on the task at hand, were the happiest of all.

This seems entirely consistent with everything I’ve learned from my Buddhist meditation practice. A concentrated mind is a mind at peace, is still, unwavering, and contented. A wandering mind is a mind in conflict. One of my favorite expressions from Buddhism refers to the “monkey mind”, a mind bouncing around from this thought to that thought like a monkey jumping from this tree limb to that. Concentration practice, the first part of meditation instruction, trains the mind to stay on the object you intend the mind to stay on (the breath, a mantra, etc.). With more and more practice, the benefits of this concentration make themselves apparent; you achieve clarity, calmness, and a profound sense of being at ease.

So while this research wasn’t in the slightest way about meditation, it does reinforce one of the most important foundational teachings in any meditation practice: the benefits of concentration. The moral of this research seems to be, if you stray, you pay.

New research published in the January 30th issue of “Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging” reported that meditation for 30 minutes a day for eight weeks changes gray-matter density in areas of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress.

The research involved 16 individuals with no past experience with meditation. They received MRI scans both before and after the eight weeks of meditation practice. The research participant’s brains were compared with a control group who did not practice meditation. The scans show increases in brain matter in the meditation practitioners and no differences with the control group.

So why is this important?

When research can materially demonstrate changes in the brains from a very brief period of meditation practice in the areas that control learning and memory processing, emotional regulation, self-referential processing and perspective taking, that is a good endorsement for a daily practice. To have more neural hardware for learning and memory, to manage ones emotions, to take perspective, and to process the “self” seems like a very good thing to me indeed.

But more to the point, anything that science can do to take the benefits of meditation out of a mystical, spiritual realm and plant it firmly in objective, measureable phenomenon seems valuable if it opens meditation up to more people. I know of no other practice that is as valuable for the development of a healthy self.

And just think about the changes that accrue to long-term meditators. So please don’t delay, and start meditating today. Every little bit helps!

The topic of selfishness and selflessness have been coming up in some of my clients therapy sessions lately, and a recent column published in the NY Times about altruism (Is Pure Altruism Possible? by Judith Lichtenberg, 10/19/10) have got me thinking about the topic more.  Is there such a thing as pure selflessness or pure altruism?  Is selfishness always a problem?  Is there such a thing as good selfishness?  Are we really only playing semantic games?

I’ll begin by saying I don’t want to simply play games with language.  I think there’s something to the issue of selfishness and selflessness that are worth our consideration.  I remember many years ago being interviewed by the magazine Rhode Island Monthly for my work as an AIDS Buddy volunteer.  In the interview I quoted the His Holiness the Dalai Lama about good selfishness.  The idea is that by doing good for others, good feelings accrue to the doer, and this is a form of good selfishness.  I think it’s a valid point.  So in this regard, selfishness per se isn’t a problem.

The other thing about pure selflessness versus selfishness is that nobody likes a doormat.  I think it’s vitally important to stand up for oneself, to manifest sufficient self-respect, to not allow anyone to take advantage of you.  To be “selfless” under these kinds of conditions is problematic and frankly doesn’t reflect a healthy “self” to begin with.

But all this talk of self evokes the Buddhist in me.  Buddhism has a lot to say about the self, and depending on which brand of Buddhism we’re talking about, they have slightly different things to say.  Theravada Buddhism, sometimes described as the older version of Buddhism, has a concept called Anatta, which loosely means no-self.  In Theravada’s version of enlightenment, the self and all of material existence drops away and you remain immersed in a sea of pure, blissful nothingness.  The Mahayana tradition, which came later, has a different view and rejects the concept of Anatta.  Mahayana Buddhism embraces both the relative and absolute, form and emptiness, and enlightenment in this tradition reflects a non-dual union of both.  I have embraced the latter view and my current studies are in the Mahayana cannon of scripture.

From a non dual perspective, if you do good for someone else you are literally doing good for yourself, because while there is the appearance of a self over here and the other over there, there is experientially no separation.  Thus, pure compassion arises naturally.  My meditation teacher once asked his teacher—one of the most significant modern proponents of Theravada Buddhism, Mahasi Sayadaw—about compassion, and the response was that Theravada Buddhism doesn’t account for compassion.  I prefer a Buddhism that has compassion as its foundation.

Which brings us back to selfish selflessness.  From the Mahayana Buddhist perspective, there is no contradiction whatsoever.

I came across an interesting article from ScieneDaily (May 13, 2009) regarding a research study first published in the medical journal NeuroImage that demonstrated that long term meditators show increased volume in certain regions of their brains, specifically “the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus — all regions known for regulating emotions.” As the article states “research has confirmed the beneficial aspects of meditation. In addition to having better focus and control over their emotions, many people who meditate regularly have reduced levels of stress and bolstered immune systems.” The lead research author Eileen Luders, a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, is quoted as saying “these might be the neuronal underpinnings that give meditators’ the outstanding ability to regulate their emotions and allow for well-adjusted responses to whatever life throws their way.” Of course, the article offers the caveat that it cannot be known if these individuals already had these larger volume brain regions and that’s what drew them to meditation in the first place. At the same time, the article acknowledged the neuro-plasticity of the brain and how environmental factors can influence the very structures of the brain. Either way, more and more research is demonstrating how a regular meditation practice, applied with discipline, can improve so many aspects of life. So I’ll close with a simple question: what’s keeping you from practicing and enjoying these obvious benefits?

I had the privilege of attending a seven day meditation retreat during the last week of January and it gave me the opportunity to reflect on how meditation and psychotherapy, while vastly different, both support and compliment each other. Both practices reflect on ones mind, and each come at it in slightly different ways. In psychotherapy, the reflection rests more within the context of the relationship between the client and the therapist while in meditation, the reflection is largely internal and solitary. Nevertheless, both practices strive to achieve insights into the workings of ones own mind towards the goal of alleviating suffering. And it’s really important to understand those workings, because without that understanding, things can get a bit messy. Imagine if you will that you’re given the instruction to drive a car for the very first time without ever having sat in a car before. You wouldn’t know the difference between the brake pad and the accelerator, the gear stick, the steering wheel. If you attempted to operate the vehicle under those conditions you would very likely damage the car and possibly hurt yourself. Living ones life without some fundamental understanding of ones own mind is like that. So whether its meditation or psychotherapy or some other form of self reflection, just do something to understand yourself and you just might find that you achieve greater contentment in this very moment!